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I am pleased to report that A Happy New Year is moving along its warlike path at the predicted speed of one day in twenty-four hours and that it is already the end of January. Spring will come before you can say Jack Robinson, as Kipling’s bicolored python would put it, and soon there will be snowdrops to glean. Etymology and spelling are the topics today. Some other questions will be answered in February.

Etymology

Sod, seethe, suds

Our correspondent Paul Nance is not satisfied with the idea that sod is related to seethe because the senses don’t match; he also wonders where suds in the triad seethe-sod-suds comes in. As concerns his doubts about sod and seethe, he is in good company. Yet Skeat was probably right and the two words seem to be related. We should first note that sodden, the petrified past participle of seethe, contains the syllable sod. The form of some importance is Dutch zode “sod,” “boiling,” and “heap, a lot,” the latter usually occurring in the forms zooi or zo. It is not immediately clear whether all of them are related and with how many words we are dealing (one, two, or three).

I think the best clue to the sod – seethe question is provided by Engl. suds (the singular sud also exists, but its meaning can be left out of the present discussion). English has a regional verb suddle “to sully,” a congener of German sudeln “to daub; sully; do dirty work,” often translated rather misleadingly as “to botch.” Sudeln is believed to have arisen as the result of the confusion of two different roots: one meant “cook” (compare “boil,” above); the other, which meant “sap, moisture,” referred to small bodies of water (pools, puddles, wells, and so forth) and is present in many words of the Indo-European languages, Old English among them. But it is not the ancient history of sudeln that matters. Engl. suddle looks like a borrowing from Dutch or Low German. The same is true of Standard German sudeln, which does not antedate the 15^th century, and of Engl. suds, which goes back to the fifteen-hundreds. They emerged too late to be classified with native words. Finally, the same holds for sod, another fifteenth-century intruder, and here comes the main point: sod is almost certainly allied to suds and suds is almost certainly allied to seethe. By the law of transitivity, sod is also allied to this verb. Mr. Lance writes: “In Upstate New York, sod is only occasionally sodden.” But the semantic history of the entire group (sod, suds, sudeln, and suddle) should be looked for in the Low Countries.

House and hood

Even though house might refer to “covering,” while hood, a cognate of hat, certainly does so, they are not related. The ancient vowel of hood was long o (as in Engl. or, without the r glider after o), while house, from hus, had long u (as in Engl. too), and no bridge connects them.

Engl. house and German Haus

Why do the cognates Engl. brother and German Bruder (to cite one typical example) have only br- in common, while house and Haus sound alike? House and Haus owe their similarity to good luck. It was the so-called German Consonant Shift that drove a wedge between German and the other Germanic languages. Engl. tide and German Zeit “time” are cognates, but the new consonants in Zeit destroyed the similarity. The consonants s and h stayed intact in German, and the vowel (long u) changed the same way in both German and English; hence house and Haus. However, the vowel shift, great or not so great, had partly unpredictable results; compare Dutch huis. The vowel in bread has undergone many changes since the Old English period, and it is hard to believe that both o in German Brot and ea, pronounced as short e, in Engl. bread go back to the same diphthong au. I have known a student who tried to translate an English text into Russian with the help of a German dictionary and, miraculously, had some success. Foreign languages are tough. One’s mother tongue may also look foreign. Thus, ea in bread, as opposed to e in bred, does not increase the amount of happiness in English spellers, and the horror of lead/led is known to many of us.

Latin antiquus

Thomas Lambdin, Professor in Harvard Department of Near Eastern Studies, once suggested that the Latin adjective antiquus “old, ancient” was a borrowing of Aramaic attiq “old.” One of his former students asked me what I can say about this conjecture. I have known for a long time that scholars’ etymologies of English words depend very strongly on their professional orientation. Those linguists who specialize in Old Norse point to possible Scandinavian etymons of English words, while Romance scholars find equally plausible Old French roots. (I am not speaking of the monomaniacs who trace all words of English, and not only of English, to Hebrew, Irish, Slavic, and so forth: those are simply crazy.) Similar things happen in some other areas. Modern linguistics is strongly influenced by the concepts of English phonetics and syntax, because the Chomskyan revolution, before spreading to the rest of the world, took place in the United States and its creator was a native speaker of English. Someone noted that, if N. S. Trubetzkoy were not a native speaker of Russian, some of the central ideas developed in his epoch-making book The Bases of Phonology (Grundzüge der Phonologie) may not have occurred to him.

Professor Lambdin is an expert in Semitic linguistics and, naturally, receives impulses from the material he knows best. I happen to be well-acquainted with his books and even reviewed the etymologies offered in his untraditional manual of Gothic. It is true that that the etymology of antiquus entails several difficulties, but, in my opinion, suggesting that that adjective came from Aramaic is hard to justify. As usual, the closeness of forms is not a sufficient argument. We would like to know why such a basic concept had to be taken over from a foreign language, under what circumstances the borrowing took place, and whether it filled a lacuna in Latin or superseded a native synonym. In the absence of additional arguments I would stay away from such a bold hypothesis.

Dwell and its Latvian parallels

I read the comment on the subject indicated in the title of this section with great interest. Such parallels are of utmost importance. They prove nothing but add credence to some of our conjectures. If a certain semantic shift happened in one language, it may, theoretically speaking, have happen in another. In etymology, high probability and verisimilitude are often the only criteria of truth. That is why Carl Darling Buck’s dictionary of synonyms in the Indo-European languages is so useful.

Spelling and spelling reform

Spelling: whose cup of tea?

One of our correspondents wonders why Modern English spelling is so irrational. It would take a book to answer this question in detail, but the main reasons are two.

1. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 French and French-educated scribes imposed their habits on English spelling, and the medieval norm has more or less stayed intact to this day.
2. The second reason is the loyalty of English to foreign spelling. The Spanish don’t mind writing futbol, while English speakers live with monsters like committee, though one m and one t would have been quite enough. Nor do we need sugar, chagrin, and shrine, to say nothing of fuchsia, despite its origin in a proper name.

Thus, the chaos most of us bemoan stems from reverence for tradition. Shureli, a tru skolar wud be imensli shagrind if he were made to put a spoon of shugar in his cup of tee. The tee would taste bitter and the world wud kolaps, wudnt it?

News about spelling reform

I am afraid to sound too optimistic, but it may be that the Spelling Society is making progress, that is, it seems to have feasible plans for effecting the reform and not only ideas about how to spell the words of Modern English. English children take up to two years longer to master basic words than those of other countries (the torture imposed on dyslexics and foreigners should not be forgotten either, for aren’t we all against torture?). The sound system of English is such that we’ll never reach the elegance of Finnish spelling, but something can and should be done. For that purpose, the institution of INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH SPELLING CONGRESS has been proposed. Everyone is welcome to join it. The Expert Committee will be appointed by the delegates who will make the final decision on the alternative scheme. The main virtue of the proposal is that it seeks to engage as many people in the movement as possible. Some publishers of visible journals are already showing an interest in the cause. The public should be informed that the preservation of the status quo has serious negative economic consequences. It is no longer a virtue to smoke. Perhaps the Spelling Congress will be able to explain to the world that retaining a medieval norm in spelling (arguably the most complicated in the world) is not a virtue either. Mr. Stephen Linstead, the Chairman of the Society, has spoken on the BBC and was mocked by many for offering to tamper with a thing of beauty. This is a good sign: no success without public outrage before a novelty is accepted. A report of these events has also been published by the Chicago Tribune.

Image credits: (1) A baby in a bathtub with soap foam. © artefy via iStock. (2) George Bernard Shaw, 1914. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Monthly gleanings for January 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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• Monthly gleanings for December 2014, Part 2
• Our habitat: house
• Our habitat: dwelling

 

A dwelling is, obviously, a place in which someone dwells. Although the word is transparent , the verb dwell is not. Only its derivation poses no problems. Some verbs belong to the so-called causative group. They mean “to make do or to cause to do.” Thus, fell is the causative of fall (“to cause something or somebody to fall”). Similar relations connect sit and set and (for those who still differentiate them) lie and lay. With time, the senses and the phonetic shape of the primary and the causative verb may drift apart. For example, today no one will guess that drench is the causative of drink; yet once we know their history, we understand how drench can be understood as “cause to drink.” Such pairs of verbs exist in all the Indo-European languages: compare German fallen ~ fällen, sitzen ~ setzen, liegen ~ legen (they correspond to the English verbs given above), and trinken “drink” ~ tränken “soak, imbue, saturate.”

There once existed the Germanic verb dwelan with short l “to err” (only prefixed forms have been recorded) whose causative partner was dwaljan. By regular phonetic change it became dwellan (with e from a and long l). It should have meant “to make one err,” but it meant much more. In Old English, as in the other West Germanic languages, the only recorded senses of dwellan and its cognates were “tarry, linger, delay” and especially “lead astray,” and those senses are compatible with “err,” but “abide, stay, reside,” known to us from Modern English, is not. It was borrowed from Scandinavian. However, the Scandinavian sense also goes back to early times, and the natural question is how “stay put” and “lead astray” could coexist in one and the same word. In addition to dwellan, Old English had dwolian “wander,” gedwolen “perverse” (ge- is a prefix), and dwola “error; heretic.” The OED lists dwale “error; fraud; a soporific drink,” dwalm “confusion,” and dwelling “delay,” all hopelessly obsolete, though the verb dwalm ~ dwam “to swoon” still exists in Scots and in northern English dialects (see the brief discussion of dwalm in the recent post on qualm); only dwale “deadly nightshade” is a bona fides plant name.

Attempts to explain the puzzling semantic history of dwell have not been numerous. The regular readers of this blog know that I often praise the etymology in The Century Dictionary and in Henry Cecil Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language. In the entry dwell, the first of them lists multiple forms but stops at explaining their complexity. By contrast, Wyld offered an ingenious hypothesis. I’ll discuss it below, even though, in my opinion, there is a better one. Before turning to it, I should only say that shortcuts are of little help in this case. For example, Ernest Weekley, despite his excellent feel for semantics, made do with the following statement: “…dwellan, originally transitive, to lead astray, hinder, make ‘dull’; then linger, tarry (cf. dwell upon a subject), hence, to live.” This is fine, except for the main trouble: how exactly do we get from “lead astray” to “hinder” and further to “linger” and “live”? Semantic bridges are easy to construct but dangerous to cross. In the history of meaning, we have guidelines rather than formulas, which are so helpful in the history of sounds. By trotting gingerly one can get from any point to almost any other, for instance: “white”—“shining “—“dazzling”—“blinding”—“black.”

Dull, mentioned by Weekley, is indeed related to dwell (w was lost before u), and its modern sense “tedious, boring” goes back to “stupid.” This is not surprising, for in some contexts dull is the opposite of “bright” and “sharp”(as in dull light, dull sound). Bright and sharp people are smart, while those who are dull are not. English also has dullard “stupid person,” possibly a borrowing from Middle Dutch (Merriam-Webster online give a delightful example: “The company is run by a bunch of dullards”; apparently, such was the first context that occurred to the editors—that it should come to this!). The situation in other Old Germanic languages is similar: Gothic had dwals “foolish” and German has toll “mad.” According to Wyld, along the way from “go astray” to “tarry” the sense “wander” can be reconstructed. The connecting link between that of “wandering” and “dwelling,” is allegedly “hinder, delay”: “…’to wander, having lost one’s way; to linger, delay, in doubt which way to go’, and finally, ‘to remain where one is’.”

Wyld realized that simply moving from one sense to another by imperceptible steps is a risky procedure and referred to the Classical Greek tholos “sepia” (it has been attested with stress on either syllable) and a related Greek adjective meaning “muddy, troubled.” On the strength of those words, he assigned to the root dwal- ~ dwel- the meaning “go in the dark.” The sense “obscure, dark, lacking clearness,” Wyld said, could develop into both “delay” and “folly.” I have nothing but admiration for this reconstruction, especially because most other sources don’t bother to discuss the semantic history of the verb dwell, but Wyld’s reference to Greek is, to use the polite jargon of scholarship, less than fully persuasive. A somewhat questionable cognate from a non-Germanic language carries little conviction, the more so as the Sanskrit cognate points to “bend,” rather than “dark.”

In my opinion, the famous German dialectologist and lexicographer August Lübben had a more realistic idea. He developed it in an 1871 article devoted to the enigmatic Middle Low (= northern) German legal term altvile (plural; much more probably, al-tvile than alt-vile), and it would have been short of a miracle if Wyld had known that article. I ran into it while investigating the etymology of the noun dwarf, so more or less by chance. Lübben showed that some of the words clustered round Middle High German twellen (West Germanic d became t in German: compare Engl. do and German tun) once seem to have meant “move in a circle.” To be sure, a person moving in a circle gets nowhere (is delayed) and labors under the illusion of making progress (is led astray). Lübben was interested in showing that altvile meant feeble-minded people, “totally deranged” (al- is a reinforcing prefix), but our concern is with the verb dwell. If its protoform referred to running stupidly in a circle and thus both moving and staying in the same place, it follows that Old Scandinavian used one interpretation of the verb (“tarry, linger”), while West Germanic used the other (“be led astray, be stupefied”).

As noted, English dwell took over its present day meaning from Scandinavian; the borrowing goes back to the Middle period. The root of dwel- ~ dwal- meant “dimwitted, dumb,” as also explained above.

Quite naturally (in light of the history of the verb dwell in English), the noun dwelling does not antedate Middle English either. We observe that this noun has never become a true synonym of home or even house. It is still a formal word signifying a place of residence. When a borrowed synonym begins to compete with native words, the intruder usually carves a “niche” (do you pronounce it as nitch?) for itself unless it succeeds in destroying and ousting old-timers. Such things happen, but we won’t dwell on this depressing subject. There are enough sad things happening in the world without our contributing to the global freeze.

Image credits: (1) Blind-Man’s Buff, published by Paul Jarrard & Sons (London, England). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Beehive hut, Dingle Peninsula, Co. Kerry, Southern Ireland. Photo by Dirk Huth. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Our habitat: dwelling appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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• Monthly gleanings for December 2014, Part 2
• Season’s greetings, or “That’s the cheese”
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    About a year ago, my husband and I became fed up with my cluttered nightstand.  I do a lot of work in my bedroom, (I know, bad sleep hygiene) and my nightstand was practically sagging with the weight of all of the books, magazines, and doo-dads that I'd piled and placed on its surface.  So, I bought a wonderful basket made specifically for such clutter and placed it near the nightstand.  Then I cleansed.  I cleared off the top of that nightstand completely and filled that basket with only the most worthy of items: back issues of Atomic Ranch and Dwell magazines, a Frommer's guide to European Cruising, and a thick file of clippings and photos of ideas for the dream house that we're hoping to build when we become empty nesters.

    It felt good, clearing things out, cleaning things off, tossing the old and unnecessary.  When I finished, I was left with a wide, empty surface, a tabula rasa, a plank of possibilities. All I needed was my lamp and my alarm clock.  That's all I needed.

    For about a week.

    I couldn't help it.  I need that framed photo of my husband and me with our dear (now dead) dogs, Daphne and Bessie, even though the frame is broken and the whole thing has to lie flat now.  I need that Gustav Klimt paperweight that I bought at a museum in Vienna.  I need that.  And I need those back issues of Multimedia and Internet at Schools magazine that I pilfered from the school library (Don't worry, I'll give them back!).  And I need my latest copy of Games magazine, which I take a whole month to finish, considering I can only work on it for the ten minutes before I fall asleep each night.  I need that.  And I need my nook!  I need it there on my nightstand.  And I need that awesome candle that one of my students gave me for Christmas that makes the room smell like a spa.  And that's all I need.  I don't need anything else.  Oh, I need my glasses, those I need.  And a box of tissues and a book about Twitter because I may start tweeting someday soon.  But that's it.  That's all I need.

    My nightstand is back to looking exactly how it looked before I bought the basket.  And the basket is now overflowing, too.

    I'm not bothered by the sight of my cluttered nightstand anymore.  It's still-life.  It's metaphoric.  You can learn a lot about a person by looking at her nightstand. What does yours say?

    Did you ever see "The Jerk" with Steve Martin? Here's the scene that will pretty much sums up my experience: (I apologize for the half-green screen image.  It was the only copy of the scene I could find.)